The air grew colder, whipping about them in unsteady gusts. Maria leaned closer to Lah-Shar’s neck and closed their eyes. Usually Maria enjoyed the sensations of swoop and fall, the thud of wings through the air, the rush of air across skin.

But not this time.

They had left the equatorial human settlement of Avalon hours earlier. They normally received their orders before taking a lift up to the geostationary space station from the Inter-Galactic Assembly of Sentient Species (IGASS) Base.

Not this time.

This time Lah-Shar had interrupted their break with an emergency mission, told her to get her go-bag ready and be on her balcony within the hour. Late night flights were unusual, but not unheard of, so she dressed for a chilly flight and drank a mug of tea while she waited. They really wanted a cup of tea right now. Warm, strong and milky, and a warm blanket. Possibly another hat and thicker gloves.

‘You can have a drink when we stop for the day.’ Lah-Shar thought, amusement rumbling through Maria’s mind with the comment.

‘I’ve told you before, stop reading my mind.’ Maria projected frustration and anger at the intrusion.

‘I’m not, you project strongly. Your mind takes on a strange flavour when you want tea.’ Lah-Shar grumbled back in her mind.

‘How much longer? My arse is numb!’

‘Two hours. Maybe three.’

Maria groaned. There was no way they’d manage to stay still for that long. She was in pain already.

Lah-Shar, having reached his altitude, levelled out. He turned towards the aurora around Ascends northern pole.

‘You still haven’t told me what the emergency is. Why are we heading to the tundra?’ Maria hunkered down as far as they could against the scales on Lah-Shar’s neck. It was hard, the air condensing on his neck coated it with ice, and the spines he liked to project were a little too spikey for comfort.

‘I’ve told you everything I can. There’s an emergency on one of the prison planets.’ Lah-Shar had a grumble back in his mind-voice. He wasn’t happy about the lack of information either, as far as Maria could tell.

‘And why do we have to go so far? We could have taken a ship from the Avalon station.’ Maria sighed.

‘It needs to be secret.’

‘Why?’

The Assessment Office had it’s ways, but they’d never heard of secret missions. Although, come to think of it, why would they have heard about secret missions? Humans weren’t exactly the most welcome species in the Assembly. Too fractious and violent to be trusted to run their own colonies unsupervised. Too lazy to meet other sentients as equals and to learn about their cultures and languages. Too uncivilised to be allowed more than associate membership of the Assembly, rather than full membership.

‘The Assessment Office demanded it. The Senior wouldn’t even tell me what it was about, just to come to the tundra base.’

Maria jolted out of their reverie on human weakness and limited status in IGASS.

‘What tundra base? Since when did we have a tundra base?’

‘Search me. I didn’t know we had one either, until half and hour before I picked you up.’ Lah-Shar’s mind-voice was as confused as Maria felt.

“Oh.” Maria said aloud. They took a deep breath, and coughed as the frozen air hit her lungs.

‘I told you to keep your mouth closed and nose covered. It’s cold enough to freeze your blood up here. I’m burning as much as I can to keep my own blood flowing.’ Lah-Shar sounded tired. It must be hard work keeping warm and flying through the dark-cold.

‘How are you still flying? I thought the star-dragons liked hot places?’ Maria used the colloquialism humans had given Lah-Shar’s species from first contact with the Assembly. They weren’t actually reptiles, but had a sort of reptilian outline that fitted human stories of dragons. They couldn’t breathe fire either, although there were stories about that…

‘Do you have to call us that?’ Lah-Shar groused.

‘You regularly me an uncivilised ape.’ Maria’s thought’s dripped with sarcasm.

‘You humans are uncivilised; if we hadn’t made contact you’d still be living in underground shelters on your poisoned planet and dead moon.’ Lah-Shar huffed a laugh.

‘My three-times great grandparents were on the Moon when the Assembly made contact.’ Maria said with pride. Her family had been space-born humans for generations.

‘I know; I met them. I told you before, I was one of the contact crew.’

Images flooded Maria’s mind as Lah-Shar shared his memories of the first contact between humans and representatives of the Intergalactic Assembly of Sentient Species. The look of terror and confusion on the faces of the administrative officers on the Moon flickered through Maria’s mind; a novel experience, having pictures in their mind. The scenes played out like a video on a pad. First contact, negotiation, the first humans to travel on an IGASS star ship. Lah-Shar had seen so much, it almost overwhelmed Maria.

‘I was young then.’ Lah-Shar broke into the images with his mind-voice, ‘I was young then. My uncle needed a secretary and the Academy volunteered me.’

‘Straight out of the Academy?’ Maria was surprised. She’d been among the first humans allowed into the IGASS Academy, and had to study for four years longer than other candidates to be allowed to join the Assessment Office.

‘Well, I’d done some of the initial assessments on your solar system.’ Lah-Shar sounded modest, but his mind projected pride over his words.

‘Not mine. I’ve never been there. None of my family have lived on Earth for seven generations, have they? We lived on the Moon then joined the first humans to travel out-system to other planets, and my parents were both born here.’ Maria was as proud of her family’s history of exploration and space travel as Lah-Shar was of his career with IGASS.

‘I meant the human home system. Arsh-Aan is my system, even though I lived here for a hundred years and haven’t even been to Arsh-Aan for four of your centuries.’

‘Oh, I suppose I see what you mean. Like, even though Ents have moved to other systems, they call Ascend ‘home’ when they talk to Mum and Dad.’

‘I wish you humans would stop giving other Sentients names from your mythologies.’

‘We can’t help it; we’re creatures of stories. It’s quite interesting really. When you look at our history and self-descriptions – ‘

‘Stories aren’t everything, Maria.’ Lah-Shar interrupted the impending monologue. Maria could go for hours if he let them.

‘Humans like stories. It helps us make sense of the world. You should know this stuff, Lah-Shar, you studied us!’

‘Indeed I did; I studied humanity for my Master degree at the Academy, for fifty years. There were so many cultures, even among those who live, like your ancestors, on the Moon, that I wasn’t able to assess every aspect of human society.’ Now Lah-Shar was getting on to his own monologue.

‘All humans tell stories, Lah-Shar.’

Below them forested mountains looked like crumpled sheets of paper. Maria caught glimpses of lights below, and to the east the light from Ascends star was filtering across the landscape. They’d been flying all night.

‘You mean they like to lie.’

‘NO!’ Maria shouted in their mind, ‘Not lies. Well, some people like to lie, but every sentient species has liars, you lie sometimes. But all humans tell stories, and often the stories have some truth to them. We always had stories about how the world came to be, and the stories changed when we learnt more.’

‘And changed again when humans met IGASS.’ Lah-Shar sniggered in their mind.

‘Yes.’ Maria said vehemently, ‘So it helps us deal with big shocks like that by giving other Sentients names from our stories. It helps us place you in our mental universe.’ Maria was excited, she wanted to talk about this, it was so interesting.

‘Maybe we should do the same? You lot look a lot like a pet my people have. A small, bipedal, and hairy. We call the Shinit. They’re not apes, or even mammalian. They’re more like us in biology.’

‘Reptilian?’

‘Well if you must use references to Earth life-‘

‘What else should I compare you to?’

There was silence for a time as the pair simmered in their distress. Neither felt able to restart the conversation, fearing an argument in the air.

Eventually, Lah-Shar said, calmly, ‘Can’t you just call us what we are?’

‘I could, if you’d prefer?’ Maria said quietly, hoping that it would help repair whatever rift had formed. She always felt on the back foot with these things.

‘Maria, we’ve worked together for five years-‘ Lah-Shar tried to start the conversation again from a different angle.

‘Four years, eight months and two weeks since I finished my Academy studies and my exams to join the Assessment Office.’

‘Yes, yes, alright. Well, how often have I told you not to call me a dragon in that time?’

Maria thought for a few seconds, ‘Five times. I think. It doesn’t come up that often.’

‘You don’t have to be precise.’

‘Yes, I do. I always have to be accurate and clear in speech and writing.’

‘Only on Assessment reports. In general conversations you can be more flexible.’

‘I don’t like to lie.’

‘It’s not lying.’

Lah-Shar’s frustration blew through Maria’s mind. Maria shrank in on themself. They’d done something wrong. Again. They were always getting things wrong.

‘Look, I didn’t mean to upset you, Ria, I know you can’t help it.’

Maria sighed at the gentle coaxing and a soothing feeling spreading through their mind.

They flew in silence for some time. Maria

‘Hey, I see lights! We must be near the base!’ Lah-Shar’s excitement suffused the mind link.

Maria dared to peak, lifting her head slightly to look for the lights.

“Where?” They spoke aloud for the first time in hours.

‘North-east, two miles. You should be able to see them.’

Maria watched the circle of blue lights became larger and brighter as they flew towards them, angling and losing altitude. Ascend didn’t have an ice cap, but had extensive tundra and the planetary tilt meant it was winter in this hemisphere. Closer to the pole, snow had fallen. Sunrise was coming to the tundra, glinting off the distant snow. The sky was blushing blue-pink, and the air was warming as they came closer to the surface.

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